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Early years

Gibran Khalil Gibran was born into a Maronite Catholic family from the historical town of Bsharri in [8] northern Mount Lebanon, then a semi-autonomous part of the Ottoman Empire. His mother Kamila, [9] daughter of a priest, was thirty when he was born; his father Khalil was her third husband. As a result of his family's poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling during his youth in Lebanon. However, priests visited him regularly and taught him about the Bible, as well as the Arabic and Syriac languages.

Gibran's home in Bsharri.


Gibran's father initially worked in an apothecary, but with gambling debts he was unable to pay, he went to [10][11] work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator. Around 1891, extensive complaints by angry subjects [12] led to the administrator being removed and his staff being investigated. Gibran's father was imprisoned for [7] embezzlement, and his family's property was confiscated by the authorities. Kamila Gibran decided to follow her brother to the United States. Although Gibran's father was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left for New York on June 25, 1895, taking Kahlil, his younger sisters Mariana and Sultana, and [10] his elder half-brother Peter (in Arabic, Butrus).

Kahlil Gibran, photograph by Fred Holland Day, c. 1898.

The Gibrans settled in Boston's South End, at the time of the second-largest Syrian-LebaneseAmerican [13] [1] community in the United States. Due to a mistake at school, he was registered as "Kahlil Gibran". His [12] mother began working as a seamstress peddler, selling lace and linens that she carried from door to door. Gibran started school on September 30, 1895. School officials placed him in a special class for immigrants to learn English. Gibran also enrolled in an art school at a nearby settlement house. Through his teachers there, [7] he was introduced to the avant-garde Boston artist, photographer, and publisher Fred Holland Day, who encouraged and supported Gibran in his creative endeavors. A publisher used some of Gibran's drawings for book covers in 1898. Gibran's mother, along with his elder brother Peter, wanted him to absorb more of his own heritage rather [12] than just the Western aesthetic culture he was attracted to. Thus, at the age of fifteen, Gibran returned to his homeland to study at a Maronite-run preparatory school and higher-education institute in Beirut, called "al-Hikma" (The Wisdom). He started a student literary magazine with a classmate and was elected "college poet". He stayed there for several years before returning to Boston in 1902, coming through Ellis Island (a [14] second time) on May 10. Two weeks before he returned to Boston, his sister Sultana died of tuberculosis at the age of 14. The year after, Peter died of the same disease and his mother died of cancer. [7] His sister Marianna supported Gibran and herself by working at a dressmakers shop.

Debuts, growing fame, and personal life


Gibran was an accomplished artist, especially in drawing and watercolor, having attended art school in Paris [citation from 1908 to 1910, pursuing a symbolist and romantic style over the then up-and-coming realism. needed] [7] Gibran held his first art exhibition of his drawings in 1904 in Boston, at Day's studio. During this exhibition, Gibran met Mary Elizabeth Haskell, a respected headmistress ten years his senior. The two formed an important friendship that lasted the rest of Gibrans life. Though publicly discreet, their [15] correspondence reveals that the two were lovers. In fact, Gibran twice proposed to her but marriage was [6] not possible in the face of her family's conservatism. Haskell influenced not only Gibrans personal life, but also his career. She became his editor, and introduced him to Charlotte Teller, a journalist, and Emilie Michel (Micheline), a French teacher, who [17] accepted to pose for him as a model and became close friends. In 1908, Gibran went to study art [18] in Paris for two years. While there he met his art study partner and lifelong friend Youssef Howayek. While most of Gibran's early writings were in Arabic, most of his work published after 1918 was in English. His first book for the publishing company Alfred A. Knopf, in 1918, was The Madman, a slim volume of aphorisms and parables written in biblical cadence somewhere between poetry and prose. Gibran also took part in the New York Pen League, also known as the "immigrant poets" (al-mahjar), alongside important Lebanese-American authors such as Ameen Rihani, Elia Abu Madi and Mikhail Naimy, a close friend and distinguished master of Arabic literature, whose descendants Gibran declared to be his own children, and whose nephew, Samir, is a godson of khalil Gibran.
[16]

Kahlil Gibran memorial inWashington, D.C.

Death
Gibran died in New York City on April 10, 1931, at the age of 48. The causes were cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis. Before his death, Gibran expressed the wish that he be buried in Lebanon. This wish was fulfilled in 1932, when Mary Haskell and his sister Mariana purchased the Mar Sarkis Monastery in Lebanon, which has since become the Gibran Museum. Written next to Gibran's grave are the words "a word I want to see written on my grave: I am alive like you, and I am standing ] beside you. Close your eyes and look around, you will see me in front of you

Kahlil Gibran memorial inBoston, Massachusetts.

Gibran willed the contents of his studio to Mary Haskell. There she discovered her letters to him spanning twenty-three years. She initially agreed to burn them because of their intimacy, but recognizing their historical value she saved them. She gave them, along with his letters to her which she had also saved, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library before she died in 1964. Excerpts of the over six hundred letters were published in "Beloved Prophet" in 1972.

The Gibran Museum and Gibran's final resting place, in Bsharri.

Mary Haskell Minis (she wed Jacob Florance Minis in 1923) donated her personal collection of nearly one hundred original works of art by Gibran to the Telfair Museum of Art in Savannah,Georgia in 1950. Haskell had been t

Kahlil Gibran

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